EDITOR'S CHOICE -- SCOTT SUTTELL

Did Oberlin College handle a racial incident properly?

Blog Entry: March 05, 2013 1:04 PM | Author: SCOTT SUTTELL

When hate crimes happen on campus — as they have at Oberlin College, the goal should be to provide targeted students “all the support they need without empowering provocateurs,” according to this analysis by TheAtlantic.com.

By that standard, though, Oberlin overreached when it canceled classes on Monday, writes Conor Friedersdorf, a staff writer at the website who has covered such incidents both as a college journalist and a professional newspaper reporter.

“Cancelling classes on Monday for a 'day of solidarity' seems mistaken to me,” he writes. “Whether the perpetrator is a racist, or a cruel provocateur, or someone carrying out an ill-conceived hoax, this gives them what they sought: on a college campus, where everyone is gathered to advance their education, someone succeeded in disrupting the community's core function. Like an arsonist who lights a match and watches the show, they're likely enjoying the spectacle.”

Ideally, he concludes, “Oberlin could show unmistakable support for its students — the ones who feel victimized and the ones who don't want to be made to feel like victims — and at the same time, signal to racist provocateurs that no, they cannot cause a spectacle. To signal that the perpetrator is marginal and weak — that he or she isn't worth it.”

The libertarians at Reason magazine have a similar take — albeit one that's filled with contempt for the famously liberal school.

“Do they actually think whoever is responsible for the incidents cares at all about the college's solidarity? … Everybody knows that trolls feed off responses like this. Could they possibly have given this guy much more of an ego boost than to essentially wasting thousands of dollars in students' tuition (Oberlin's tuition for this academic year is $44,512) by cancelling classes?”

This and that

Needs a little seasoning: Former Cleveland Mayor/Ohio Gov. George Voinovich has been out of the political game for a while, but he pops up in this Wall Street Journal story to provide some context for a story about prospective U.S. Sen. Cory Booker.

The Journal notes that Mr. Booker, the high-profile mayor of Newark, N.J., is trying to pull off what few people have been able to do — ascend directly from City Hall to the U.S. Senate.

Since 1789, the paper notes, only 20 mayors have moved on to the Senate within a year of serving in their local capacity.

Mayor Booker is media savvy and, through his role as a surrogate for the Obama campaign, has greater recognition that the average major, the story notes. But the leap to the Senate still won't be easy.

Mr. Voinovich, who lost his first Senate bid in 1988 after serving as Cleveland's mayor, tells The Journal that a local candidate needs to have a statewide base and national profile to run for Senate.

"It's just a portion of the package," says Mr. Voinovich, who won the Senate seat in 1999 after serving as Ohio's governor. "After I had been governor for eight years, my package was a lot more complete."

Mr. Buffett talked about the subject in the context of railroads, since his company, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., owns Burlington Northern, and Berkshire is starting to spend real money on natural gas fueled locomotives.

Mr. Cramer said that as natural gas takes off for surface vehicles, investors should pay attention to Chart, which makes equipment that is used to convert natural gas into liquefied natural gas. (It also sells the storage tanks needed to transport liquefied natural gas, and the engine tanks that hold LNG for heavy-duty trucks.)

Chart also stands to benefit from exposure to China, Mr. Cramer said.

“China is dramatically ratcheting up its use of natural gas, and they're even building out infrastructure to start replacing diesel with nat gas as a transportation fuel," he said.

Mr. Cramer added, "The company has a host of other non-natural gas related businesses as well. Chart uses its freezing expertise to deal with industrial gases, and they have a biomedical division where they make liquid oxygen therapy systems.”

The story focuses primarily on the New Orleans Times-Picayune, a paper that already has made the move to three-days-a-week-in-print publication that many observers expect will happen at The Plain Dealer.

People who would like to preserve daily print publication of the Advance papers have pushed for the Newhouse family, which owns Advance, to consider selling them.

But CJR nips that idea in the bud.

“If they sold the (New Orleans) paper right now, the Newhouses probably would get less than $40 million for it, based on the earnings multiples of recent newspaper sales,” according to the story. “By radically slashing costs, as they have done — perhaps by as much as $25 million — the company can earn that amount in a couple of years thanks to higher profit margins. Anything beyond that is gravy.”

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